Black List

Caroline Romero. If she was here, he had to be able to pick her out.

He watched the video feeds for another forty-five minutes, until it was time for him to get in place. Removing the custom pistol from inside the armrest, he placed it in his lap and covered it with a jacket. It was showtime.

Placing the Denali in reverse, he backed out of the parking space and pointed it toward the street. At the edge of the lot, he sent the “bump” to the monitors of the hotel security office. There was a flash of snow and then everything was fine. If the guard had been watching and not distracted by paperwork or texting on his cell phone, it would have appeared as if the power had momentarily dipped before coming back full strength. Unless he was attentive enough to notice that the valets taking cars at the front of the hotel weren’t driving those same cars into the garage, then everything would be fine.

Nicholas wasn’t worried about the guard. He had enough camera feeds to keep him busy without making distinctions among the separate feeds. Besides, from what his personnel file said, the guard was a twenty-eight- year-old single male. With all the attractive women in short dresses climbing out of low-slung sports cars at the front door, it was easy to determine where his attention would be focused.

With a quick SDR to make sure he wasn’t being followed, Nicholas rounded the corner, passed the entrance to the Casa De Palmas, and drove into the parking structure.

He kept his eyes open for any vehicles that didn’t belong there or might portend trouble, such as a delivery truck or a large windowless van. As he wound his way to the third floor, he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

After conducting a slow crawl of the upper deck to examine the other cars, he found a spot toward the center and pulled in. The sun had set over an hour ago. A smattering of lights on tall poles cast an incandescent pallor over the exposed roof of the parking garage.

In his rearview mirror, Nicholas could make out the pedestrian bridge that led back to the hotel. As he was studying it, a chime rang from his computer.

He looked down and clicked on one of the windows he had left open. Caroline had just posted a message for him: Coming out.

Nicholas looked around. Was she in one of the cars? The hotel? He couldn’t be certain.

When none of the car doors opened, he assumed she meant she was coming out from the hotel itself. Bringing up the live camera feeds from inside the hotel, he began searching for her.

Near the bar area on the ground floor, a woman stood waiting for an elevator. Was that her? She wasn’t facing the camera. Her head was down and she seemed to be looking at her phone. She was about the right size, but so was every other woman who had walked into the hotel that night. When the elevator doors opened, she stepped inside and disappeared.

Less than a minute later, the elevator arrived at the third floor and the woman walked out. Once again, he couldn’t see her face. She seemed to know where all the cameras were. Nicholas’s heart had begun beating faster but not because he was excited to see Caroline Romero. He had a bad feeling something wasn’t right.

Even so, he tried to tell himself to calm down. Caroline was an exceedingly intelligent woman. If she was in enough trouble to call him for help, she was very likely in enough trouble that she didn’t want her face captured on a security camera. Nicholas wanted to believe in her abilities, but he was having a hard time. Instinctively, he reached down and wrapped his hand around the butt of his pistol. The dogs could sense their owner’s unease and leapt up in back, their eyes scanning out the cargo area windows as they tried to figure out what was going on.

Suddenly the woman appeared on the pedestrian walkway. She stopped when she got to the parking area and looked around, unsure of where to go.

Nicholas took a deep breath and tapped his brake lights. The woman began walking forward.

She was attired like the other women he had seen entering the hotel that night, in heels and a short dress that clung to her body. A small cocktail purse hung from her left shoulder. The phone now gone, both of her hands appeared empty. His eyes flicked from her hands to her face, which he still couldn’t see. She walked with her head tilted down. Was she trying to throw off the cameras? Or was this all about throwing me off?

The woman was closing in on the Denali, and Nicholas’s trepidation was going through the roof. As she neared, alarm bells started going off inside his head. Everything inside him was yelling that danger was approaching. Put the truck in gear and go—drive and don’t look back, the voices told him. Yet he ignored them. Argos and Draco had started growling.

Any time he may have had to react was now gone. The woman was so close she could touch the vehicle. And as quickly as that, he lost sight of her.

The dogs were now barking as they lunged at the back window. Nicholas craned his tiny neck from side to side as he tried to figure out where she had gone. A trap. He should have known.

Revving the Denali, he prepared to slam it into gear, when a face suddenly appeared at the passenger-side window. Without even thinking, Nicholas raised his pistol to fire.

He centered it on the woman’s forehead and began to depress the trigger. But before he could fully engage, he jerked the weapon to the left.

The barking of the dogs was so loud that Nicholas couldn’t hear himself think. They had raced forward and were straining to leap into the passenger seat to get at the figure outside. He yelled for them to be quiet.

He had never seen this woman before in his life. It wasn’t Caroline, but there was something familiar about her.

She reached down and tried to open the passenger door. It was locked. She looked back at Nicholas.

“She was wearing leather pants,” the woman said through the glass. “She had short, spiky black hair back then.”

Before he knew what was going on, the woman was reaching into her purse. Nicholas reflexively swung his weapon back toward her, ready to fire.

But she wasn’t reaching for a gun. From her purse she produced an old photograph and pressed it up against the window. He now realized why the woman standing there was so familiar to him.

Lowering his pistol, he reached behind him with his left hand and hit the unlock button.

As soon as she saw the lock pop up, the woman opened her door and climbed in. “I can explain everything,” she said, before Nicholas even had a chance to speak, “but we need to go. Now.”

CHAPTER 12

BASQUE PYRENEES

SPAIN

WEDNESDAY

The sun had just begun to rise when the knock fell upon the door. “It’s open,” Harvath said from the stove. He didn’t bother to turn around. He knew who it was.

A Basque man in his early forties stepped quietly inside and shut the door behind him.

“There’s coffee on the table.”

The man walked over and pulled out a chair. Sitting down, he withdrew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out, and lit it up. “It looks like I’m right on time.”

He had dark hair and a clean-shaven face. His serene countenance was juxtaposed by his impeccable, military-style posture and a pair of brown eyes that seemed a little too alert for a man of his profession.

“I heard the dogs as your horse got near,” Harvath said as he approached the table with a pan and spatula. “I hope you like eggs, Father.”

The priest took a deep drag on his cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs for a moment before releasing it into the air and nodding.